Using the Placeholders Autocomplete feature to make placeholder selection painless

If you're a fan of placeholders, then you may have recently seen the
good news
that we announced. Previously, using placeholders in your tickets often required you to memorize the more common ones or to frequently refer to our
list of available placeholders
. Even the savviest placeholder users may have found themselves scratching their heads occasionally while trying to remember the names of placeholders they used less frequently. Fortunately, now we make it much easier for you to take advantage of the added flexibility of placeholders by detecting when you've begun typing one and then presenting you with a list of matching placeholders from which you can pick and choose the one you need.

Of course, there's a chance you may be asking yourself what placeholders are. If you're unacquainted with placeholders, we have a great
introduction
on how to use them.

How do I insert placeholders using this new feature?

Currently, the new feature is available when you are creating a new ticket or updating an existing ticket. Using it is fairly simple: all you need to do is start typing
{{
in the comments or descriptions fields, and a list of placeholders will appear as shown here:

At that point, you have two options for finding the placeholder of your dreams:

If you remember the beginning of the placeholder, keep typing. As you type, the list of placeholders gets more specific. For example, {{ticket.tic is all that's necessary to bring up the {{ticket.ticket_type}} placeholder. Once you've found your placeholder, press the
enter
key to insert the complete placeholder.

You can also use the arrow keys on your keyboard to browse through the placeholders if you don't remember the name of the placeholder and need to review the descriptions of the placeholders to find the one you need. As with the first method, you can simply press the
enter
key to select the placeholder once you've found it.

Soon, the days of having to rack your brain for the name a particular placeholder or having to juggle browser tabs to look up the placeholder in our reference list will be at an end. Currently, this feature is only available when creating or editing a ticket, but it will soon be rolled out to all the various other places where placeholders can be used. As always, we encourage you to keep an eye on our
What's new in Zendesk?
forum for the latest news on new features in Zendesk.

1 Comments

This is a GREAT feature but I was wondering if it could be improved upon by allowing users to type in {{ and then any part of the placeholder instead of having to know the wording of the placeholder front to back. I think that without that kind of search functionality, this feature has limited usefullness.

Another small tweak to make this feature better would be to allow scrolling through ALL of the placeholders once someone types {{.